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Tag: Rendering Artifacts

When using the CGI methodology of Shadow-Mapping, one concern which can strike the power-user, is that his shadow-map doesn’t have a much-higher resolution, than his main picture-resolution. This concern seems valid, because while his camera-perspective is being mapped back to itself at whatever resolution it has been set to, a shadow-map is being rendered first, at whatever resolution, but there is no reason to assume that 1 pixel belonging to the shadow-map corresponds to 1 pixel belonging to the camera-perspective.

I.e., The pixels of the shadow-map could be mapping a 3D surface inclined much with respect to the shadow-map, but not inclined as much, with respect to the camera-perspective, which can magnify what the shadow-map did to that 3D perspective.

Hence, the following rendering-error can happen:

In my case, there was essentially an incorrect and a correct explanation, as to why this rendering artifact could have been happening:

Incorrect Explanation:

My shadow-map resolution is already at 2048×2048, and yet is still not high enough to win out, over the camera-resolution, of 800×600…

Correct Explanation:

The rendering of the 3D surface seems to be contingent on the shadow-map having been drawn, when in fact it should be contingent, on whether the closeness to the light-source of the object, is greater, than whatever closeness is recorded in the shadow-map. In other words, The distance in the shadow-map could be completely unknown, and the object in the foreground should result as being closer to the light-source by default.

The way to correct this problem in my case was, ‘Place an arbitrary surface in the BG of the scene, but within the Z-range of the light-source.’ Doing so caused the entire shadow-map to be rendered, which meant that any part of the 3D object which did not explicitly have anything between it and the camera, finally defaulted to being visible.